The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead

Hoeller, Stephan A.

The text of C.G. Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead, written in the heat of inspiration in three evenings, and psychologist Hoeller's interpretation and commentary on them, comprise this book. Jung considered Gnosticism the link between alchemy and his own researches in the phenomenology of the soul. The Seven Sermons is a modern Gnostic text which Jung believed was dictated to him. He felt that all of his later work came out of this period of inspiration. Hoeller gives a history of Gnosticism and an overview of Gnostic thinking, and places Jung's work within that context. Of most value to parapsychologists are observations on synchronicity and on the modus operandi of psi, which Jung viewed as manifestations of the characteristic of archetypes which he termed "trangressivity." Archetypes are capable of manifesting both "internally as a psychic image and externally as a physical event, at times even as a physical object" (p. 183).